Restlet Blog

All the Restlet team is excited to share some great news today. We are announcing a large seed funding round, our company Board and new team members!

Open Roots

When I launched the Restlet open source project on TheServerSide in 2005 as a consultant, I didn’t know how far this could lead me, but I knew Restlet Framework was the first of its kind, true to the principles of the Web (the REST architecture style published in 2000).

It changed the way Java developers can build and consume web applications & sites, without forcing previous paradigms such as RPC and MVC into a web “pipe” or artificial separating web server (think Servlet) and web client (think Apache HTTP client) technologies.

After many iterations, we reached version 1.0 and transformed Noelios as a company in 2008 with my co-founder Thierry Boileau to offer professional services. This allowed us to fund the R&D effort on Restlet, dedicate time to the writing of ‘Restlet in Action’ book and refine our ROA/D methodology.

In 2010, our technology was getting mature with 6 consistent editions supported (Android, GWT, GAE, Java SE/EE, OSGi) and the web API and cloud computing market were warming up. We started thinking about the next 5 years, now that REST and web APIs were about to become mainstream.

What was our next challenge?

APISpark, a PaaS for Web APIs

We decided to build a product around our open core that would help developers create and use the hundreds of thousands of web APIs expected in the coming years.

Our new mission was to democratize REST and web APIs for the broader developers community, beyond our community of API experts and Java engineers.

APISpark was born from the idea that creating APIs should be as simple as creating blogs on WordPress.com: a couple of minutes, a simple browser and a fraction of the “Do It Yourself” cost. APISpark brings together the IDE, hosting and management aspects into an unified Platform as a Service (PaaS) for APIs.

We also renamed the company to Restlet and changed our business model to leverage the cloud economics. APISpark is a freemium service that any developer can use free to get started. See our pricing page for details.

Funding, Board and Team

In order to successfully pivot, we needed funding, help from experienced entrepreneurs and a stronger presence in Silicon Valley. Today, we are happy to announce that we have closed a $2M seed round from two European VCs (SIPAREX and CapDecisif Management) and a few individual investors.

We are also delighted to welcome our Board members: Bertrand Diard, co-founder and VP Strategy of Talend, Reza Malekzadeh, VP Business of Cumulus Networks and Matthieu Hug, CEO of Fujitsu RunMyProcess, along with our investor representatives. See our Board page for details.

In addition, we are welcoming Stève Sfartz as a third co-founder and VP Engineering. His strong experience in online service operations and R&D management will help us grow and structure our engineering team. Olfa Zorgati is also joining our team as our new CFO, based in the Silicon Valley where I’m moving as well. See our Team page for details.

We have also posted our first job descriptions for open positions immediately available in our engineering team.

Thanks!

I’m excited to pursue Restlet adventure and would like to thank all contributors to the Restlet Framework, early testers of APISpark, company advisors, numerous partners and customers who helped us getting so far!